Low pay: A wage to live with

At a time of rising unemployment, pay freezes and deep public-sector cuts, you’d expect that efforts to raise the wages of cleaners, care assistants and other low-paid workers would be doomed. Yet a long-running campaign to make sure these workers earn enough to live on is gaining momentum, attracting support from across the political spectrum and from a growing number of employers. As David Cameron said just before the general election, the living wage is “an idea whose time has come” and it’s a concept Labour leader Ed Miliband is vigorously promoting.